THE POWDER MONKEY

THE POWDER MONKEY

When I was a boy there was only three houses at Island Harbour. There was the Lyall family, us [Jim McNeill] and Grandfather [Charles McNeill], only three houses but we were never lonely. We were all happy. That's all we knew, I guess.

I remember old Uncle Ern Lyall, he used to make what he called a Powder Monkey for the New Year. He had a long iron rod that he hauled his nets over, that was upstairs in his house. It wasn't an inch round, I don't think. He'd have brown, parcel paper saved, and he'd wrap that around and around that rod, then he'd tie it all up with some kind of small thread. Like small trout twine like they made trout nets out of, or something like that. That would be almost three feet long. He'd slide that almost off the rod then tie it tight so it wouldn't slip any further. In them days we had black gunpowder for loading cartridges. He'd dampen that powder, get a saucer and mix water with the powder, make a powder paste to make little wads of powder. He'd have a little pile of these damp wads. He'd put some of the wads down in the paper casing, then he'd put so much dry powder in, more damp wads and more dry paper, do that to the length of the paper casing.

Them times we used to have old tongs, like fireplace tongs. He'd take the tongs, grab a fire coal out of the stove, go out by the door and touch the top of the rod with the fire coal. You've heard tell of what they used to call Christmas sparklers? Fire Crackers? By and by there'd be sparks flying from it, when it'd come to the dry powder it would go BANG! When it come to the next damp wad there'd be sparks again. He'd hold that rod until it was all gone. We children really enjoyed that, we'd be dancing around watching this powder monkey. He made that every year as long as he lived. I enjoyed these sort of things.

LEONARD McNEILL
1996 - POSTVILLE

THEM DAYS VOL. 23.2